Manuel Canovas

Manuel Canovas founded his house in Paris in 1963, and the first collection shocked the French design world. The colours were too strong and the patterns too large, as he himself put it much later. He felt French interiors had become static and the palette outdated — and staked out a position the house has held ever since. The business is located on rue Saint-Honoré in Paris and has been part of the Colefax Group since 1998, the same family of houses as Colefax and Fowler and Larsen.

The palette is the signature. Fuchsia, turquoise, deep greens and warm coral shades recur, often in combinations few other houses would put together. The motifs are drawn as readily from Indian paisleys and ikat as from Chinese porcelain blue, French eighteenth-century documents and American patchwork quilts — a mix that reflects Canovas's Spanish background and his travels. French printing keeps the registration so precise that even intense colours stand clean against one another rather than muddying.

Brittfurn offers Manuel Canovas fabrics, often in the role of accent rather than as the fabric used throughout. A couple of cushions, an upholstered chair or a pair of curtains in the house's palette can change the temperature of an otherwise muted room. The fabrics also work as upholstery on smaller pieces, where the colour is allowed to work on a contained surface.

Strong colours read very differently depending on the size of the surface and the light in the room. In our fabric visualisation tool you can try a Manuel Canovas fabric on a piece of furniture and see how the colour behaves as it follows seat and back — the effect is often quite different from what a small sample suggests. The wallpaper visualisation tool lets you see at the same time how the wall behind responds to your choice of colour. If you would like to compare several colours side by side in daylight, our showroom on Östermalm in Stockholm is at your disposal.